Choosing and defining your event
Define the event before you look for anything else
- Write your event as one sentence with a start and an end. If you cannot, you have a topic, not an event, and the essay will drift into narrative.
- Give it boundaries in time. The reform of the state sector between 1986 and 1988 is an event. Economic change is not.
- Give it boundaries in place and people. Who did it, to whom, where.
- The box on page 2 is where this sentence goes. It is the first thing the marker reads, and it frames everything after it. A vague entry in that box predicts a vague essay, and markers know it.
The three permitted forms, and what each costs you
- A discrete event — a single occurrence with a beginning and an end.
- Best for this paper. Causes sit before a date; consequences sit after it. Every link can be timed.
- Cost: if the event is very small, its consequences may be too small to pass the significance test.
- A development or movement over time — a campaign, a reform programme, a movement.
- Allowed, and often what schools teach.
- Cost: the contextual paragraph swells, and "before" and "after" blur because the event is spread across years. If you use one, pick a defining moment inside it as your anchor.
- A person's role in a significant event.
- Allowed, with a warning printed in the standard: biography alone is insufficient.
- Cost: the pull towards life story is strong. The essay must be about the event; the person is how you enter it.
Testing significance in five questions
- The standard lists exactly five measures, and an event that passes all five is safe:
- Importance to people at the time — did contemporaries treat it as mattering?
- Depth of impact — how much did affected lives change?
- Number of lives affected — hundreds, or hundreds of thousands?
- Duration — did the effects last months, or generations?
- Ongoing effects — is anything still traceable to it?
- You do not need to score highly on all five. An event affecting few people very deeply for a long time is significant; so is one affecting everybody slightly for a decade.
- Say which of the five your event satisfies, in your introduction, in one clause. It costs eight words and it establishes the significant in the question's own terms.
What makes a cause a cause
- A cause is something that made the event more likely, or made it take the form it did.
- Three types, and using different types is what makes two causes genuinely "different":
- Long-term causes — conditions in place for years. They explain why the event was possible.
- Short-term causes — developments in the months or years immediately before. They explain why it happened then.
- The trigger — the immediate occurrence that set it off. It explains the timing precisely and, on its own, explains nothing else.
- Long-term conditions alone never explain an event, because they were also present in all the years the event did not happen. Saying so is a Merit-level observation and costs one sentence.
- The strongest pair of causes is one long-term and one short-term, because they answer two different questions — why at all, and why then.
What makes a consequence a consequence
- A consequence is a change that followed the event and depended on it.
- The dependency test is the whole game: would this have happened anyway? If yes, it is a later event, not a consequence.
- Three axes to make two consequences genuinely different:
- Timing — immediate versus long-term.
- Domain — social, political, economic.
- Who — different groups affected in different directions.
- Two consequences that differ on more than one axis are the safest pair, because the question sometimes forces the split for you.
- A consequence you can date is a consequence you can defend.
Worked Example
Worked example
A student has chosen a single dated event and drafted four possible consequences. Which two should they use, and why?
- 1: Public opinion on the issue shifted over the following decade.
- 2: A specific piece of legislation was passed eighteen months later, and its drafting committee cited the event.
- 3: Technology in the field advanced considerably over the following twenty years.
- 4: An organisation formed within six months, explicitly in response, and was still operating a decade later.
Answer:
Step 1 — run the dependency test on each.
Consequence 3 fails immediately. Technology in most fields advances over twenty years regardless of any one event. There is no way to show the event was necessary to it, so any link would be assertion.
Consequence 1 half-fails. A shift in public opinion is real, but over a decade many things move opinion. It can be rescued only with evidence tying the shift to the event specifically — polling before and after, or contemporaries saying so — and if the student does not have that evidence, it is a claim they cannot support.
Consequences 2 and 4 both pass. Legislation eighteen months later whose drafters cited the event has the dependency written into the record. An organisation formed within six months explicitly in response is about as tight as a causal link gets.
Step 2 — check they are different from each other, on more than one axis.
- Timing: the organisation formed at six months (immediate); the legislation at eighteen months and operating long after (longer-term). Different.
- Domain: the organisation is social — people organising themselves. The legislation is political. Different.
- Who: the organisation affected those directly involved; the legislation affected everyone in its scope. Different.
Three axes apart. That pair survives every version of the question, including the years that force a short-term / long-term split or ask for social, political or economic effects.
Step 3 — check the evidence exists for both. For 2: the name of the Act, the year, and the citation by its drafters. For 4: the organisation's name, the founding date, its stated purpose, and one thing it did. Four or five specific items each is what "detailed supporting evidence" means at this level.